Proudly the Opposite of What Passes for Progressive

Category Archives: Regressive Behaviour

Free speech is a sticky subject. I’m not an absolutist in the mold of Mark Steyn or Ezra Levant or others – I think there is a balance to be struck between maximizing what can (and often should) be said and what crosses the line.

Where might I draw the line? Well, for example, some clowns brought a poster to a recent Toronto FC game against the Montreal Impact, depicting a blue-thong wearing female Montreal fan performing fellatio on a supposed red hoodie wearing Toronto fan with the headline “Montreal Sucks” in French. It’s vulgar, but could you defend it as free speech? Sure, some might and I would see the theoretical libertarian argument. But where I would draw the line is that, if I have to explain it to my children then it is wrong. You’ve now imposed a burden on me that I neither asked for nor should reasonably expect to be responsible for as participating adult member of society. No thanks. That poster should not be allowed because it’s a fairly straightforward depiction of a sexual act, there’s no subjective interpretation of it required. Only extremists would argue otherwise that it’s my obligation to explain to my young daughter what that sign means and not the clowns’ obligation to exercise some basic human decency.

But then there’s the story today about a Calgary student being told to take his “Make America Great Again” hat off because it represents “hate speech”. “Make America Great Again” is one of Donald Trump’s campaign slogans. In the video of the incident the young lady objecting to the hat (who is surprisingly attractive and not an obese ugly troll like so many SJW’s) cites her incorrect understanding of what Trump wants with regards to immigration and as such because it’s a Trump hat, regardless of what is actually written on the hat, it represents something hateful. In SJW parlance then she’s “triggered” by the sight of the hat and wants it removed because it offends her.

Now we’re into subjective interpretation as opposed to the Toronto FC sign. If we go down this route almost anything anyone says or writes may be construed by some person somewhere as “offensive”. It’s a never ending rabbit hole to fall into. But this is what the vast majority of SJW’s want; the carte blanche power to essentially bully anyone and everyone that they disagree with into shutting up because they’re being offensive, they’re triggering people, they’re infringing on “safe spaces”.

Here’s a prime example of the psychopathic bullying of an SJW in full flight. Watch the video and tell me that if you were not the Lyft driver you wouldn’t have not only kicked this bitch out of the car way sooner, but also backed the car up and tried to run her over to do the world a favour. Thankfully there’s been some justice since this became public and this abusive woman with obvious mental problems has been driven underground and off social media. The driver has a right to display the bobble head of a Hawaiian person because there’s no obligation imposed on the persons seeing it to interpret it any other way that how it’s presented. Had the presentation been of a Hawaiian person being cut in half by a white navy captain? OK… that would cross the line and you’d be within bounds to ask to have that removed from sight.

It’s nuanced, but not that difficult for ordinary people to exercise common sense. But we do need to actively tell the triggered little babies of the world to stuff it because free speech is a continuum; at one end is the vulgar, indecent, truly offensive that is hard to accept but at the other end is honest scientific inquiry – if you give the SJW’s an inch they will take a mile and soon they won’t just be shutting down offensive speech, they’ll be shutting down research and analysis that just happens to uncover truths they find uncomfortable.

Why not? Let’s have another opinion on Brexit from someone who isn’t British or lives in England.

It’s awesome; a fantastic victory for the right over the left. And not the “far-right” as the progressives clambers over each other to proclaim at how shocked andappalled they are by the victory of racists and bigots. No, a victory for the right that rejects ideas of over-arching government bureaucracy and micro-managing of every little aspect of your life, a rejection of the idea that one-size-fits-all policies and pan-continental/world government should take precedence over local and community solutions and desires.

The EU over-reached; had it simply remained a free-trade bloc with the capacity for labour and goods to move freely within its members this would never have happened and the original goal of the EU, post WW-II, of a more integrated Europe to prevent future military conflicts, would have been achieved. But no, it decided to pursue a pan-European government, a one-size fits all pan-European currency, and saddle the continent with a largely unaccountable bureaucracy that nobody really cared for.

The Leave campaign argued that the U.K. is being prevented from negotiating free trade deals with the US, Canada, Asia et. al. by its ties to the continent which has been experiencing near zero growth for the past decade. That’s not anti-trade or isolationist, it’s a valid belief that the economic grass is indeed greener on the other side. The proof is in the pudding; strikes and protests are going on right now in France about such minor reforms to labour laws that we here in Canada have to laugh, but it’s so hard to hire and fire people that the French economy has stagnated. Germany has so few young people that its economy has been stalled for years and so it’s come to Merkel taking a massive gamble that letting in over a million Syrian men will give their economy the boost of young labour and entrepreneurs it desperately needs. Really? Then you have basket-case countries like Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and others that can barely pay their bills and need massive floats of funding from other countries who know, deep down, that they will never see that money back again.

The economic arguments are there, the sovereignty-erosion arguments are there. So the left have to dip into making last ditch arguments about racism and xenophobia. Take for example our virtue-signaler in chief, John Oliver, who does these long form TV essays on issues he wants to expound upon from the angle of his choosing, but when he does get caught out because his facts are wrong or he chooses to omit certain key arguments, he just says “I’m a comedian, not a journalist.” He gets to have his cake and eat it too. But on this issue even he can’t float the Remain boat for too long on the basis of legitimate arguments and of course, slips into the Nigel Farage is a racist bigot etc. argument.

Here’s what the Left do really well – they END arguments. They don’t WIN them, but they are very good at ENDING them. They simply try to discredit the other side as being racist, homophobic, and bigoted, climate-deniers etc. and they unilaterally declare arguments are OVER. The Left has a long track record in recent years of being tremendously successful at doing this. But they tried that here, and it didn’t work. This is why there’s going to be so much anger and angst in the next few weeks and months. This is a bad precedent for the Left, and we on the right have been given a reason to cheer for a change.

On the eve of the Olympics starting, we ask a quick question – are we alone in not caring a mouse’s fart about the Olympics?

Oh sure, there’s some entertainment and spectacle in the Games depending on the event, but on aggregate, what a massively expensive boondoggle. Most people couldn’t give a crap about 90% of the events, and that’s not diminishing the skill, dedication and talent that these competitors bring to their event, but really… nobody cares about shot putting.

And in the end, outside of a couple of niche events, like Kenyans dominating the longer distance races, the medal haul is directly proportional to GDP x population size… so we can tell you already, the top 10 medal hauls will likely be the US, China, Russia, Germany, Brazil, France, Great Britain, Japan, South Korea and Italy (in no order). It’s the rich countries beating up on the poorer countries.

And then the cost… $20 billion for these London Olympics. Granted, they will earn a few billion from advertising and ticket sales and corporate sponsorship. But the difference is being made up by the taxpayers. And in the meantime we are subjected to stories about threats that anyone wearing a Pepsi shirt into an event will be tossed (Coca Cola is the official sponsor of un-healthy drinks), or the Olympic licensing committee coming down on some poor old Lancashire grandmother knitting doll’s sweaters with the Olympic rings on it for charity. Horrors.

Or how about the ongoing dispute over who will get the Olympic stadium after the Olympics – Tottenham Hotspurs or West Ham. Tottenham originally proposed that the stadium wasn’t good for much else other than hosting once-in-a-lifetime track and field events and not very good for soccer matches, so as part of their proposal for taking the stadium over post-Olympics, they were going to tear down half of the stadium, remove the track and then move the field closer to the stands on one side and rebuild the other side… tear down half of a $800 million new stadium – because it didn’t work for much else. And you know what? They were right. But lo and behold the Olympic organizing committee stepped in, and West Ham now seems set to get the stadium, so you’ll have a shit team playing in a field that will look a million miles away from the stands… This is the kind of crap legacy the Olympics leave.

We could go on. We haven’t even touched on the security.

But no – every two years, the Olympics, whether they’re Winter or Summer, get shoved down our throats by media networks whose executives in a fit of conformity and group-think bid billions for the rights to broadcast these games, and so they get artificially hyped and what was once a true contest of amateur athleticism, something we all should celebrate, has been sadly transformed into a saccharine melodrama of corporate advertisement, political grandstanding and diluted contests.

We’ll watch the 100m sprint. That’s it. Maybe the soccer final if we see it on TV. That’s it. We swear.

PS – Not that we find pictures of little kids shooting the finger all that funny… but it looks like a classy Feyenoord fan. Feyenoord spawned Robin van Persie. van Persie wants out of Arsenal. Robin van Persie definitely sucks. Full circle. Hakuna matata, baby.

Like this:

We here at RA aren’t evangelical Christians, but neither are we eager to jump on them. Sure, sometimes people praying in public or holding Prayers for America political rallies can be tiresome at best and embarrassing at worst, but unlike Misters Dawkins and Hitchens and their cynical ilk we don’t believe the problem in the world is too much religion; maybe, just maybe, the problem is there is too little of it.

This brings us to Tim Tebow, on this Denver Broncos post-defeat Monday. Not another social media posting on Tebow, you say? Well, not a long one at least, and definitely not the last.

What exactly was wrong with anything Tebow did these past couple of months?

Sure the hype got out of hand, but take Bruce Arthur at the NP for example, writing that he’s grateful that Tebow is gone. Or in his column last Friday, where he equates Tebow’s popularity with the fact that 37% of Americans believe in Creationism and that the world is only 10,000 years old. This is exemplary of condescending elitist thought that one can’t be a publicly devout Christian, without being some kind of a simpleton that chooses to ignore scientific fact.

It is one of the pathologies of the left; reduce ‘others’ to caricatures. It makes any criticism easier, it cuts off debate and lets them all chuckle about things amongst their friends. Ha ha, what morons these evangelicals are.

Anyway, in all the press conferences that Tebow has given, we don’t recall him ever expressly thanking Jesus for a specific win or touchdown. What he has basically shown is the equivalent of gratitude for being put in the position that he’s in, and he gives some credit for that to the Lord and his faith in Him. That’s all. Sure he invokes the name of the Lord and is very consistent in providing his thanks, but if he were to leave out Jesus, and simply say that he is grateful to have been given this opportunity and the chance to do what he can with it, that kind of humility would have been applauded. Instead it’s mocked and gets reviewed like someone who’s staring with fascination into a fishbowl where a three-eyed goldfish is meandering about.

Matthew Syed in his book Bounce talks about the effect faith can have on an athlete’s performance; when an athlete is able to surrender their fate on the field to a higher power, it actually improves their capabilities, it improves their performance. There are a number of reasons for this that is grounded in the psychology so many of these media elites hang their hats on, and not of a religious nature at all. So for that reason, should we ever begrudge an athlete his or her prayers before, during or after their accomplishments on the field of play? It’s been proven to benefit them, and so be it. Maybe the Leafs goalies should say some prayers on a regular basis.

So, yes, Tebow is a pretty limited quarterback. Yes, we find it hard to believe he hasn’t married that smoking hot girlfriend of his yet (or at least the one rumored to be his girlfriend). But regardless, we hope Tebow can keep things going again next year and prove the doubters wrong. And maybe inspire another one or two Jimmy Fallon ‘Tebowie’ songs.

Like this:

A broad swath of people, it seems, has co-opted the term “progressive” to describe themselves, their world view and their dreams for a socially engineered nirvana on earth.

It’s a catch-all phrase these days that seems to cover everyone on the left of the political and cultural spectrum; from your left-of-centre Canadian Liberal Party apparatchiks to the anarchy lovin’ Occupods taking an open-air shit in your local community park. From the secular humanists and their Human Rights kangaroo courts to the polar-bear hugging enviro-loons who think the world is set to melt like Belloq’s face when he opens the Lost Ark in the first Raiders movie.

It’s a badge they wear proudly, because let’s face it; if they’re “progressive” then everyone who disagrees with them, or has opposing viewpoints, must then, of course, be “regressive”. And the term regressive implies a desire to have society move backwards, the rejection of social advancements and nostalgia for more simple thinking.

Yeah, well, not quite.

But, if the term’s been hijacked already, and being progressive means wearing hemp shirts, 100 mile diets, weeping at Jack Layton’s last words or thinking Rosie O’Donnell should stop the seal hunt, then we gladly reject the label and adopt Regressivism as our cause. And that’s what this blog is about.